I chose this image to top up this post because watching last night's episode of Lost made me feel a lot like Sawyer looks there: exasperated, frustrated, and in a place where I once had some fun but am now just stuck.I can only imagine what you’re thinking.
"Why do I still watch this show?"
I can only imagine what you’re feeling.
"Did you guess bored? Disappointed?"
And if I had to put a voice to those thoughts and emotions, I suspect it would sound something like this: “You know, the last thing I want to read right now is a couple thousand words from Doc Jensen about the relevancy of existential literature, progressive rock, and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky to Lost.What I really want right now is to hear from exec producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof about why they did what they did tonight during ‘The Candidate.’”
Oh, well, yeah. That's pretty accurate, actually.
Spoilers ahead, Losties. SERIOUS MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. IF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED “THE CANDIDATE,” STOP READING RIGHT NOW.
But back to your thoughts. “Forget the title of the episode. ‘The Candidate’ had absolutely nothing to do with finding and naming Jacob’s replacement and instead had everything to do with making me feel really, really, REALLY crappy! How dare they take down Jin and Sun in a sinking submarine! How dare they make the Korean couple’s daughter Ji-Yeon an orphan! And how dare they kill Sayid! So what if he died a heroic death and by trying to smother the Locke-ness Monster’s bomb? He’s Sayid! We love him! Why did they have to die? WHY?”
I devoutly hope this isn't what people are saying. Because, you know, if characters aren't in jeopardy, watching them or reading about them (or whatever) is pointless. The Amazing Adventures Of Nothing-Ever-Happens Lass sounds like a really stupid show.
“Because now you know this show is willing and capable of killing anyone,” says Damon Lindelof,
"As long as they aren't attractive white people," he added, noting that they've now killed off two black guys, two Latinas, an Italian(?), a Scotsman, two Koreans, and an Iraqi. "Our bleaching out of what was once one of the most interesting and diverse casts on TV is almost complete!"
suddenly materializing in my office in a puff of brimstone accompanied by Carlton Cuse. (Actually, that isn’t true. I interviewed the producers over hamburgers… but I’ll tell you that boring story in Friday’s Doc Jensen column. On with the important stuff!)
"Oh, do you think that having burgers with Lindelof and Cuse IS interesting? How wrong you are! Dullest dinner guests I've ever encountered. Why, they make Joss Whedon look like a raconteur, and I think we all know how wrong THAT is. Oh, have you not had dinner with any of those people? My bad."
Why was it so important for Lost to prove that it can be downright homicidal during its last season? To establish once and for all that the Locke-ness Monster is the true villain of season 6 and quite possibly all of Lost. “There is no ambiguity,” says Cuse. “He is evil and he has to be stopped.”
Well, that's THAT potentially interesting and ambiguous element taken right off the board. Good work, guys!
Or, as Terry O’Quinn told me in a recent interview: “Puffy is one nasty mo-fo.”
To be clear, the producers are not heartless bastards. They’re only semi-heartless bastards. They knew fans would be devastated (and angry) about the deaths and were pretty broken up themselves about offing three beloved creations. “When we watched the death scenes ourselves, it was brutal,” says Cuse. “[But] the story always comes first.”
You're so brave.
I hate crap like this. If the creators are seriously concerned that the fans will be angry about deaths ... I mean, it's the FINAL SEASON. What are they gonna do, NOT watch the last few episodes? NOT buy the last season's DVD? Come on.
And "the story comes first" is just dumb. "We had plot-shields up so none of these characters could get hurt for five seasons; now our show is almost done and what little story remains just HAPPENS to demand that they die." Seriously: shut up.
Lindelof elaborates: “In many ways, the season was structured as a long con on behalf of the Man In Black. Once we revealed that Locke was the Monster, we knew the audience would immediately mistrust him, and we would have to spend at least a dozen episodes of Locke trying to convince the audience that he did not have malevolent intention, that all he wanted to do was get off The Island....
Let me get this straight: is he actually saying "Once we showed A, we knew the audience would assume B -- which, it so happens, is exactly correct. So we wanted to use a dozen or so of our precious remaining episodes to convince them for a little while that, in fact, C. But, no, it was B all along. Ha ha!"
This is, in a word, freakin' dumb.
But everything he was doing was leading up to one moment, which was [trying to] get the candidates in one fell swoop. He knew if he killed just one of them, everyone would know what he was up to.’”
"And this was the ONLY way that could happen!" Except for -- and this is all assuming Jack's correct in his in-story interpretation of the monster's actions -- letting them get onto the plane and get blown up by someone who is not Locke. Or any of the other nine million times he could've coerced them into killing one another without getting caught doing it. I really am beginning to suspect that Javier Grillo-Marxuach was the one who made the early seasons smart and interesting.
Says Cuse: “There will be very little debate at the end of this episode that [Fake Locke] is evil and bad and has to be stopped. The main narrative reason for him killing our main characters is to establish how much of a bad guy he is and to clearly identify him as the antagonist rolling into the end of the series.”
This is a TERRIBLE narrative reason for a show to be doing ANYTHING, let alone killing off some of your most entrenched, developed characters. I say it over and over and over again, but the only good narrative reason for something to happen is because the character WANTS it to happen to achieve some kind of clearly defined goal. If you're plot-hammering characters into doing things to signpost stuff for your viewers, YOU HAVE GONE OFF THE RAILS.
Lindelof recognizes that there’s something “brutal” about killing Jin and Sun just one episode after their long-awaited reunion — which, he says, is exactly what made the lovers such an apt choice for making a statement about Fake Locke’s malevolence.
See above. "Why'd we kill Sun and Jin? To show that the guy who did it is EVIL, obv. You wouldn't have gotten that if he'd just, for example, snapped some random guard's neck! This was a COUPLE. With a KID! He's an orphanmaker!" Moronic.
“At least they got to die in each other’s arms, so they’d have some sense of victory,” he says.
Yes, the triumphalism was just flowing out of the screen.
Hey, what ever happened with Sun's off-island plans with Widmore? Oh, wait -- that was actually the character exercising some agency and trying to achieve a gold; it didn't serve the narrative needs of the screenwriters at this point in the story. Never mind.
And Sayid? Lindelof explains: “Sayid’s entire season-long arc has basically been, if you tell him that he is evil, you can convince him he is evil. But if you tell him he is good, maybe you can convince him he is good. We basically decided that in a moment of pure instinct, if he did something, if he sacrificed his own life in favor of saving the other people’s lives, that would convey to the audience, ‘This guy was actually a good guy.’”
Translation: "Sayid's season-long arc -- hell, his SERIES-long arc -- has been a waste of your time and mine. And the whole thing at the well with Desmond? Pointless. But look! He did something kinda awesome! CHECK THAT OUT!"
The good news for fans of Lost and fans of Jin, Sun, and Sayid in particular is that they are technically still alive — in the Sideways world. “Still, it’s bittersweet,” Yunjin Kim told me in a recent interview. “They were kept separate for so long, and then they came together to die together.”
The fact that Jensen KNOWS this stuff (a "recent interview"?) and still writes his recaps as if he's watching each episode completely wide-eyed irritates the hell out of me. Also, the fact that Jensen can see the sausage being made and STILL act dazzled by the sheer complex artistry of it all .... it's just ... just ...
Look: you know who Jensen reminds me of? Someone writing a blog for a huge corporation -- say, the Southwest Airlines blog.
Except here's the crucial difference: writing the blog for a company, you might occasionally know things that complicate what you're writing, and still have to plow ahead anyhow. But those people have a simple excuse: their JOB is to promote whatever the company does, however that needs to happen.
Someone should send Jeff Jensen the memo that he doesn't actually work for Lost, and that it's okay to be critical sometimes. And not just during Kate episodes. Back to Jensen, talking about Yunjin Kim.
She found it “beautiful” that Sun and Jin were given an end that served as an affirmation of their love and the heroic sacrifices they made for each other. “We’ve come full circle,” she says. “Sun came back to The Island [and] risked her life to save her friends and Jin, and then Jin does the same thing back.”
That's ... um ... really not that interesting? Didn't Sun do lots of other things off-island, like take over a crime family and become a hardened, complex individual in the name of avenging her presumed-dead husband? Did we just come "full circle" and ignore that?
When I asked her how she prepared for Sun’s final Island moments, Kim told this story: “Right before we started shooting, [director] Jack Bender took me aside and told me about story that he read a long time ago, about this woman who was missing her dead husband, and how she had this beach ball that he blew up before he died. Every day she took a little breath from the beach ball. And that really got me right into the emotional core of where I needed to be to play that scene. Can you imagine that woman, taking that breath little by little every day, just to feel her husband’s presence?”
See, cheesy at it is, that's actually an affecting and interesting story. If this episode had had HALF the pathos of that brief, throwaway anecdote, it would've been awesome. (NOTE: That is not actually a compliment.)
Daniel Dae Kim’s thoughts on the end of Jin and Sun? “They were the Romeo and Juliet of the show, and the fact they didn’t have a happy ending does make me sad,” says the actor,
-- who apparently does not understand that the fundamental point of Romeo and Juliet is that they die, apart and young and because of a stupid misunderstanding and their own foolish youthful pride --
who then expanded on the greater significance of the deaths to the show — but I’m afraid sharing his insights (including his take on the fate of Ji Yeon) at this point would be a bit too spoilerish.
"I KNOW THINGS YOU DON'T. I just wanted to tell you that. Now let me go spend 24,000 words pretending that I have NO CLUE what's up with this show. THE SMOKE MONSTER IS ACTUALLY CHARLIE'S LEFT ARM, AND PAGE 48 OF DUNE PROVES IT!"
What was it like shooting his watery demise? “It was pretty difficult that day,” says Kim. “Shooting in water is never easy. But the crew was considerate and made the water warm for us, in more ways than one. Let’s just say certain members of the crew who were in that water for a very, very, very long time without ever leaving. I’ll just leave it at that.”
Because nothing says drama like a good pee joke.
Now that’s evil.
Yes. Massacring children and innocents at the temple? That left ambiguity in the smoke monster's motivations. But peeing in the pool?!?!? DEMONIC!
I’m still processing the chilling
And that, that word right there, is what annoys me about Jensen. "Chilling." What was chilling about these events? It's a TV show. It was a litany of cliched dialogue stringing together action movie cliches, featuring cliched death scenes. It was, in short, just-below-average genre television. The lacrosse guy bashing his girlfriend's head in at UVA is chilling. The oil spill is chilling. My wife's near-catastrophic car trouble from the other day was chilling. This was TV. And I don't have his secret advance knowledge of the plot, either. "Chilling." Seriously, shut UP.
events of “The Candidate,” and my own thoughts and feelings about the deaths of Sun, Jin, and Sayid. My recap of the episode will post sometime tomorrow. In the meantime, use the message boards below to start the discussion — and express your grief.
Re: Grief -- see "chilling" above. Also: eat it, Jensen.
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